Despite the ideal of a paperless environment that the popularization of computers had promised, paper continues to dominate the office landscape. Ironically, the computer itself has been a major contributing source of paper proliferation. The computer simplifies the task of document composition, and thus has enabled even greater numbers of publishers. Oftentimes, many copies of a document must be made so that the document can be shared among colleagues, thus generating even more paper.
To that end, multi-function peripherals (MFPs) have been developed to perform multiple functions on paper documents, including copying, printing, scanning, and transmitting documents. Each MFP usually has a display through which a user may control the MFP and see status of the operation(s) being performed by the MFP. This control includes the selection of finishing options with respect to print operations that the MFP is to perform. These finishing options include such functions as specifying the orientation of the document image to be printed, the number of documents to be printed per sheet, the staple angle and location, the punch style, as well as others.
Although MFPs have sophisticated finishing options, selecting the desired options can be difficult for a number of reasons. First, the screens on the MFPs are small. Second, in order to select finishing options, a user must navigate through multiple screens. Third, the screens provide poor visualization of the finishing choices that have already been selected. Lastly, there is poor support for the discovery of new functions. Thus, the MFP screen interface hinder's the user's ability to access and use these functions.
Cover sheets have been used extensively for routing, distributing, packing, and mailing materials in the past. However, such cover sheets have not been used for specifying finishing options or selecting other processing options with respect to document handling systems such as an MFP. Furthermore, after the processing options have been performed, there is no record of which processing operations were performed with instructions to enable them to be reused.